


Pidge Versus Aliens

by Diremop



Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Gen, Mentions of sad but mostly probably fun hopefully, Not much plot, Pidge POV, Slice of Life, Tags Are Hard, tiny adventure
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-08-19
Updated: 2017-08-19
Packaged: 2018-12-17 09:14:58
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,917
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11848530
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Diremop/pseuds/Diremop
Summary: Now, though, she was sitting with her laptop at a kitchen table and watching an alien eat breakfast. An alien that looked straight out of Star Trek.“Allura,” she said, leaning forward over the table and trying to get a better view of Allura’s ear, “why do you look like us?”





	Pidge Versus Aliens

**Author's Note:**

> I wrote this by the seat of my pants as writing practice mostly, and it has so far been edited/read only by yours truly, but I hope somebody might find it amusing.

        At first, overwhelmed by the possibility of finding her family, Pidge mostly just went with it. Shiro crash landed in an alien spaceship? What? Okay, better rescue him. Notorious dropout she’d never talked to now living in a desert shack and talking suddenly sensible-sounding conspiracies? Alright, hear him out. Gigantic robotic lion-shaped spaceship? Awesome, let’s make it work. Portal through space, more aliens, more giant robot lions, yet more aliens. Protect the aliens from the other aliens. It felt like a blur. Maybe she’d been in shock.  
        Now, though, she was sitting with her laptop at a kitchen table and watching an alien eat breakfast. An alien that looked straight out of Star Trek.  
        “Allura,” she said, leaning forward over the table and trying to get a better view of Allura’s ear, “why do you look like us?”  
Allura finished chewing, then said, “What do you mean?”  
        “Is this a chameleon form too? Are you actually giant bug aliens?!” Pidge leaned even further forward, into Allura’s space.  
        Allura leaned back, eyes wide. “I don’t know what a chameleon is, but no? This is my true form.” Then she scowled, “Why would you think I’m a bug? Do I seem like a bug to you?”  
        “It’s a lot more probable that aliens would look completely different from humans than that they’d be basically humans with weird pointy ears.”  
        Allura slammed her hands down on the table and leaned forward until she was almost nose to nose with Pidge. “My ears are fine! Yours are the weird blobby ones! Also,” she said, straightening her spine and leaning back into her chair, “Clearly it’s you who looks like us.”  
        She might have a point. “Huh. How old is your species? Humans evolved 150,000 years or so ago.”  
        “Well,” she said primly, then paused. “… I’m not sure. A few hundred thousand or million before we were put in cryo. It’d be better to ask De-” She choked the word off in the middle and pulled a face. “Ask Coran. He’s more likely to know than me.”  
        “If both our species appeared at around the same time, maybe we were seeded by the same progenitor race. If the Voltron cave drawings on Earth were old enough - I’ll have to date them when I get back - that would mean aliens were around Earth really early in our history. Or maybe it’s convergent evolution, and similar evolutionary circumstances caused us to develop similar traits, which is anyway the only explanation I can think of for why we run into so many vaguely humanoid bipeds, like even the Galra are… Allura?”  
        Allura was frowning at the table and almost slumping in her chair.  
        “Allura?” Pidge waved a hand under her nose. “Are you okay?”  
        Allura jumped. “I.. Oh, yes. I’m fine.” Her voice shook a little, and she frowned at the table like it had just betrayed them to the Galra.  
        “Hey,” said Pidge, trying to sound gentle and not sure if it was working or not, “Was it something I said? I didn’t mean that about your ears.”  
        Allura’s lips twitched, but the rest of her still looked droopy. “I… For a moment I forgot. That… That Derel is dead. He was a biologist. He would know. You’d like him. He was a good… A… Excuse me.”  
        Allura got up stiffly and strode out the door.  
        Pidge was left leaning across the kitchen table, staring after her. “Oh.”  
        The alien spaceship hummed around her, and Pidge didn’t know what to do. After a minute, she picked up Allura’s cereal bowl and took it to the sink to wash.  
  
        Having cleaned up Allura’s breakfast and stowed her laptop away, Pidge wandered out into the hall next to the kitchen. Allura seemed to want space, so she didn’t go after her. She thought about finding Coran, but the question might upset him too and she can’t deal with two depressed aliens at one time. So instead she idled in the corridor, thinking, and after a moment it occurred to her that, similar appearance of Alteans and humans aside, it was also really weird that the Alteans had built ships that looked like Earth lions. Were there also animals that looked almost but not quite like lions on Altea? Were there maybe analogues of every animal? Her heart was racing just thinking about it. The similarity to Alteans could mean so much about human origins, and if other animals were so similar too…  
        “Pidge!” an obnoxious voice screamed in her ear before a heavy weight barreled into her side and knocked her over. “Save me!”  
        Rapid, stomping footsteps approached from somewhere down the corridor.  
        “Save yourself!” she said, and shoved Lance off.  
        “Nooo, Pidge! I trusted you!” he cried, and ran away down the corridor before swerving left into the hall that led to the swimming pool.  
        Keith appeared around the corner, scowling. His hair was pink. “Where’d he go?” he demanded, not slowing down as he stomped past her prone form.  
        Pidge, seeing Keith looking even more than ever like an 80’s stereotype, saw the light and switched sides. She pointed to the right.         “Towards the hanger!”  
        “Thanks!” said Keith, then he was gone.  
        Pidge stifled herself until the sound of his stomps faded away, then the hilarity exploded out of her in an undignified gasp and she laughed until tears leaked out of her eyes. And as she lay on the floor cry-laughing, all she could think was that she loved these people.  
  
        Whatever Lance had put in Keith’s shampoo was stubborn, and apparently Keith’s best attempts to wash it had only succeeded in fading it into purple. It reminded Pidge of the Galra, and subsequently of the fact that Keith was part Galra. And if Keith was Galra, and assuming he didn’t come out of a test tube, that likely meant that the Galra and humans could procreate, which meant that the two species must be very similar. If Keith was fertile - eww - then that would even imply that they were even the same species. Which didn’t make any sense. So many Keith was impotent, like a mule or a liger. Had anybody checked? Or told him that? Dammit. She wasn’t going to deal with that now. Or ever, if she could wait long enough for Coran or someone to get to it first.  
        The purple did bring another question to mind, though. She wandered through the castle until she found Keith sitting cross-legged in front of Red. An attempt at bonding through meditation, probably. She should try that, later.  
        “Hey, Keith?”  
        “What’s up?” he said, slowly opening his eyes and twisting his head around to look at her.  
        “How do you feel about the color of human flesh?”  
        “… What.”  
        “Do you like skin tones? Do you think they would look good on a wall? Maybe on all the walls?”  
        Keith was looking at her strangely now, eyebrows crinkled in towards his nose. “Are you a serial killer?”  
        “That’s a no?”  
        “That’s a no.”  
        “What about purple? Would you ever paint anything purple?”  
        “No.”  
        Interesting. So either Keith hadn’t inherited the trait - recessive genes? - or it was more of a sociocultural thing. Voltron had set up a meeting with Kolivan in a few weeks, so she supposed she’d have to wait to ask him about it then.  
        “Pidge,” said Keith.  
        Oh. “I’ve been thinking about how the Galra are purple, and how they also paint all their ships and buildings and devices purple.”  
        Keith’s eyes widened, then he smiled slightly. “Serial killers.”  
        “Right. Anyway, I was wondering if it’s an inherent Galra thing to like surrounding themselves in Galra skin tones, maybe to feel like they’re surrounded by other Galra, so I asked you in case you might have inherited that trait, but either you haven’t or it’s cultural. I’m planning on asking Kolivan at the meeting.”  
        Keith’s smile had widened. “Pidge, do me a favor and let me be there when you ask him. Consider it recompense for accusing me of serial killer behavior.”  
        “Dealio!” said Pidge, and turned to go. Then she paused, “Have you seen Allura at all? I think I upset her.”  
        “That explains it, then. She’s in the training room going at the dummies. She didn’t look fun to interrupt.”  
        “Ah. Thanks. I’ll go find Coran instead then. Maybe he can help. I guess.”  
  
        Coran was no help. “Ahh, the suffering of a young one! I too of course lost my share of comrades. I feel woe for them of course, but I am old and jaded, and Allura has not yet grown accustomed to loss. I recommend letting her, what is your Earth phrase, ‘beat the shit’ out of those dummies. And don’t worry! I’m sure she’s not mad at you.”  
        “Okay, Coran. Thanks. I’ll just go and…”  
        “Derel, though. Derel was nice, and he caused no end of trouble. Why, once he tried to breed the Hafawal flowers with the Aribiatha blooms and the result was cataclysmic! We had to shut down the whole lab!” Coran paused abruptly, then said, “… Actually, that lab was still a mess when the attack hit, so maybe we should check on that. Yes. We should do that right now. This genuinely might be a serious problem!”  
        Pidge could barely keep up when he spun out the door.  
  
        They couldn’t open the door, and there was a tangled wall of green and red behind the glass.  
        “Oh no, this is bad, this is bad,” said Coran, spinning in place while doing something on his tablet.  
        “What is bad?”  
        “The plants! The Hafawal and Abriatha hybrid is characterized by excessively rapid growth, you might call it ‘explosive’ in fact, and it’s been left to grow for 10,000 years, and all the hull integrity sensors are down for this section. This is bad. We must fix this immediately!”  
        “Say again?” said Lance, since he’s an idiot.  
        “Hull breach imminent,” said Pidge.  
        Keith planted his hands against the door again and shoved. It didn’t budge. Surprise.  
        “Coran, what can we do about this?” asked Allura. She still looked a little off to Pidge, but hopefully she was imagining it.  
        “Well, nothing! We’re lucky these doors are quintuple reinforced with aricarbidite steel, and I’m afraid if we opened them the growth would, um, rapidly expand.”  
        Keith scowled. “You couldn’t have told me that before I tried to open them?!”  
        “Well, you can’t open them! No harm done!”  
        “Coran!” said Allura.  
        “Yes, well, our only option at this point is to evacuate. We have about…,” he squinted at his tablet, and his eyes widened, “No time. Everybody get out now. Out! Evacuate!”  
        They scrambled.  
  
        Five lions an a shuttle hovered a hundred clicks away from the castle. It looked fine. Pidge wished she could have seen that tablet; she couldn’t pull up any data on the castle from Green’s cockpit. Instead, she had to hassle Coran, who, possibly having saved their lives notwithstanding, was not helpful. “Coran, what exactly was it that we needed to evacuate for?”  
        “Imminent explosive plant growth. The door and the outer hull are holding back pressure far higher than they were ever meant to contain! It’s a miracle it didn’t explode a hundred years ago.”  
        Minutes passed. The castle was still.  
        “Are you sure about this?” asked Lance, “If it hasn’t exploded already, there must be something stopping it, right?”  
        “I don’t wanna go back in there,” said Hunk.  
        Stillness.  
        “Alright, Coran,” said Shiro, “If it explodes, how bad is it going to be? Are we talking the castle’s gone completely, or will it be salvageable?”  
        “I have no idea! Given the unpredictable nature of the plants in question, I can’t say which directions they’ll be most likely to expand in. That could make all the difference!”  
        Silence. Nothing moved.  
        “Well, honestly, probably no castle ship.”  
        More silence.  
        “No”, said Keith, “We need that ship. How can we neutralize the explosion? Pidge?”  
        They couldn’t reinforce the doors further, especially probably not in a way that could compare to the aricarbidite steel, and they certainly couldn’t reinforce the hull. And that would only be a temporary solution. Introducing a pesticide to the lab would require knowing what would be toxic to the hybrid plant, and they’d have to make it, which in turn would require boarding the extremely unsafe ship and spending hours in the lab at least, and then they’d have to unseal the lab. Even opening the vents to the lab… Wait.  
        “Coran, what are the plants breathing? Or eating? Are the air vents to the bio lab open?”  
        Coran didn’t answer.  
        “Coran?” said Shiro.  
        Allura cleared her throat. “I… remember that. The air vents are sealed; leaving them open would have allowed the plants’ seeds to spread through the ship. But there were at least ten scientists in the bio lab when,” she cleared her throat again, “When it happened. The Hafawal and Aribiatha plants were both extremely hardy desert plants, and by combining them Derel was hoping to make an even hardier plant, for feeding colonies on inhospitable worlds. So I… I guess it worked. It’s probably still eating the… It’s…”  
        Silence.  
        For a moment, Pidge couldn’t shake the image out of her head either. One moment scientists doing routine experiments, the next, fertilizer.  
        “Um, Coran,” said Hunk, “What happens if the plant busts out of the ship? Because if it doesn’t need to breathe that seems bad. Should we maybe move a little bit farther away?”  
        “Everyone back 500 clicks,” said Shiro. They moved.  
        Pidge shoved the stricken scientists into the back of her mind and tried to focus. They couldn’t used the vents to administer pesticides, they couldn’t reinforce anything, and they couldn’t open… Aha.  
        “If we can drill a hole in the outside of the castle ship, we could release the pressure in a controlled way. Depending on if the plants can grow in a vacuum. Coran, can the plants grow in a vacuum?”  
        “I don’t know,” Coran said, sounding duller than she’d ever heard him.  
        “Do you know if heat will kill them? Or cold?”  
        “They’re desert plants”, said Allura, “Derel kept them under sunlamps, so cold might.”  
        “So the cold vacuum of space is likely to kill them, if the vacuum doesn’t. We should drill a hole in the hull, get the plants out. They’ll explode down the path of least resistance and into space. The bio lab is sealed off from the rest of the ship already, and we can seal off the sections around it just to be safe given the bad door, so after the plants are out we can worry about repairing the breach then.”  
        “Any objections?” asked Shiro.  
        “I object to all of this,” said Hunk.  
        “Alright. Hunk, yellow has the best armor, so you’re on drilling duty. Just fire away at the lab - Coran, tell him where that is on the hull.         Keith, you help him, and be ready to help drag him out of there at speed. Lance, position yourself to the side and ready an ice blast - see if you can make it even colder, just in case. All of you set yourself up as far away from the hull as you can. Coran and Allura, your armor is terrible so hang back, and I’ll keep black in front of you.”  
        “I said I objected!” said Hunk, moving into position. Everyone else followed suit.  
        “Alright team, let’s do this quickly. We want this explosion controlled, not unexpected and uncontrolled,” said Shiro. “Go.”  
        “Vol-”  
        “Voltron!”  
        “-Tron!” yelled Hunk, and opened fire on the castle ship. With the shield’s down, the beam immediately dug into the ship, but slowly.         They waited.  
        Then a tentacle monster of a plant exploded out of the ship faster than they could react to, expanding and exploding in the vacuum. Bits and pieces of plant thumped against the lions and sent them tumbling backwards. Green hit something hard, and Pidge was rattled in the cockpit. Then there was stillness again.  
        “Everybody report,” said Shiro.  
        “I objected,” said Hunk.  
        “All good,” said Lance, “but I want a shower.” Blue looked to have gotten the worst of it and looked like some sort of soggy green and red swamp monster.  
        “Hunk, do you think we can eat this?” said Keith.  
        “Please don’t. You heard what Allura said about.. Just don’t,” said Pidge, trying not to think about it.  
        “Oh,” said Keith, “Right. Yeah, no.”  
        “We’re good,” said Allura, sounding tired. “Let’s go seal up the sections around the lab; I don’t want to risk that door giving out.”  
        “It is definitely dead, right, Pidge?” said Lance.  
        Her scanners showed it was so. “Yeah. Let’s get out of here. Let’s go to a nice planet with no plants on it.”  
        “Yeah, a desert!” said Lance, “Keith heaven.”  
        Keith groaned.  
  
        After they sealed up the areas around the lab, and as they waited for Allura to take them through a jump, Pidge had a thought.  
        “Coran?”  
        “Yes, Pidge?”  
        “How old is your species?”  
        Coran twirled his mustache. “Let’s see, if I remember right, we developed farming some 3 million or so years ago! So sometime before that. But I haven’t kept up on my biology since I was a young’un, so I may be completely wrong! In any case, we’ve changed a lot as a species since back then. Why, I seem to remember that our early ancestors couldn’t change their appearance at will!”  
        “Are you sure you’re not giant bug aliens?”  
        “Well, I never!”  
  
  
  
  


**Author's Note:**

> P.S. Writing Pidge's POV is hard. I'm not sure why, though. Maybe that's why I don't see people do it as often as other characters? But Pidge is the bestest, so I had to try. :P
> 
> Also, if I fail to respond to comments, it's not because I hate you; it's because comments turn me into a happy puddle and I get stage fright about answering. I'm trying to get better about that and will try, but if I fail, that's why.


End file.
